Medical Ethics In IndIa

Medicine has the prime aim of preserving and restoring physical health. Health actually is a state of well-being as Daniel Callahan defnes. It refers to a state of “adequate” physical, mental, spiritual and psycho-social well-being and not merely absence of disease. Christian response to sickness is not merely curing the disease but healing the person. Healing is in fact wholing or restoring the integrity of the person as much as possible.2 as Victor Frankl says, the radical cause of sickness is the loss of meaning in life and hence sickness cannot be handled efectively unless that meaning is restored. He says in his celebrated book Man´s Search for Meaning, “an incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being.” Similarly, Mowrer has drawn atention to the importance of handling moral guilt, and not merely psychic guilt feelings in the treatment of illness. Thus, even the psychosomatic approach to healing is incomplete. Health and illness have a still deeper dimension involving the spiritual area of the human personality. This noble thought would make it clear that physical curing will not alone make a person healthy.

Share:

More Posts

The Journey

Fr. Charles Davis belongs to the Diocese of Jammu-Srinagar: He left the government job and joined the diocese of Jammu Kashmir. The experience of Charles

Embryos: Humans or Biomaterials?

A human organism begins with fertilization. From the moment of fertilization onwards, human embryo has the ontological status of a human individual and thus also